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Readers! A November fund-raising drive!

 

It is unfortunately time for another November fund-raising campaign to support my work here at Behind the Black. I really dislike doing these, but 2025 is so far turning out to be a very poor year for donations and subscriptions, the worst since 2020. I very much need your support for this webpage to survive.

 

And I think I provide real value. Fifteen years ago I said SLS was garbage and should be cancelled. Almost a decade ago I said Orion was a lie and a bad idea. As early as 1998, long before almost anyone else, I predicted in my first book, Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, that private enterprise and freedom would conquer the solar system, not government. Very early in the COVID panic and continuing throughout I noted that every policy put forth by the government (masks, social distancing, lockdowns, jab mandates) was wrong, misguided, and did more harm than good. In planetary science, while everyone else in the media still thinks Mars has no water, I have been reporting the real results from the orbiters now for more than five years, that Mars is in fact a planet largely covered with ice.

 

I could continue with numerous other examples. If you want to know what others will discover a decade hence, read what I write here at Behind the Black. And if you read my most recent book, Conscious Choice, you will find out what is going to happen in space in the next century.

 

 

This last claim might sound like hubris on my part, but I base it on my overall track record.

 

So please consider donating or subscribing to Behind the Black, either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. I could really use the support at this time. There are five ways of doing so:

 

1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.

 

2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation. Takes about a 10% cut.
 

3. A Paypal Donation or subscription, which takes about a 15% cut:

 

4. Donate by check. I get whatever you donate. Make the check payable to Robert Zimmerman and mail it to
 
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
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You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.


Checking the cracks on the first Orion capsule to fly.

Checking the cracks on the first Orion capsule to fly.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

3 comments

  • How much larger is this space capsule than the Apollo capsule, and how much more of a load can this vehicle handle? Looks like they(the engineers) have a handle on stress testing and understanding the stresses that this vehicle will encounter.

  • Pzatchok

    Its not how much more load it can handle.

    Its why they couldn’t manufacturer it in the same way they did the Apollo. Which obviously did handle all its pressure and didn’t need repairs like this one did.

  • Dick Eagleson

    The root cause here is almost certainly overreliance on computer-aided engineering software, specifically, whatever package was employed to do finite element analysis of the cracked part. FEA has been around quite awhile and practicing engineers don’t typically doubt the veracity of results obtained from numerical load/stress simulations. Obviously, in this case, that faith in crunched numbers was at least somewhat misplaced. More disturbing than the unfortunate finding that a real-world object subjected to real-world stresses doesn’t behave quite like its numerically simulated virtual counterpart is the action taken – or not taken, more to the point. Instead of revisiting the design of the partially-failed component, NASA finds it adequate to just slap on some patches and plough ahead. One has to wonder whether NASA would accept a similar course of action from, say, SpaceX, Sierra Nevada or Boeing were a similar test failure to manifest itself on the crewed Dragon, Dreamchaser or CST-100? I’m betting not. And of course the hard-core NASA fanboys and the Congressional NASA porkmeisters would have a field day. As things stand, the sound of crickets is all we here from those quarters.

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